Designing Whole-Life Excellence

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, “This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.” (Luke 14:28-30 NIV)

In this four-week series, we are exploring what it looks like to pursue “whole-life excellence”, as opposed to the seemingly unattainable ideal of “work-life balance”.

Last week, we looked at the first step to achieving whole-life excellence: studying Scripture and those we serve to define standards of excellence for each of the roles in our lives.

With those standards defined, it is now our responsibility to (as honestly as we can) evaluate whether or not we are on the path to fulfilling each role with excellence, and if we’re not, make the necessary adjustments.

About a year and a half into my tenure as CEO of Threshold 360, I realized that one of the most valuable uses of my time was being on the road, meeting with large customers and prospective investors. It was becoming clear that in order to be truly excellent in my role as CEO, I needed to be traveling far more than I knew was acceptable in order for me to also be an excellent father and husband. What the role of CEO needed was starting to get out of sync with what I was willing to give in order to maintain whole-life excellence. Once I realized that, it quickly became clear that I had to hire a replacement for myself as CEO (which, by the grace of God, we were able to do successfully).

I pray that the decisions you need to make in order to achieve whole-life excellence are not as dramatic as mine. But I do hope that, once you’ve defined standards of excellence for each role in your life, you will be able to honestly assess your pursuit of whole-life excellence, and design your life in a way that best positions you to serve each role well.

This is especially important when new potential commitments pop up that vie for your time and attention. The Bible talks a lot about counting the costs of something before committing to it. Jesus’s words in today’s passage are a great example. Before we commit adding something new to our lives, we must count the cost and ensure that, if we take it on, we will be able to continue to pursue excellence in the roles we are already committed to.

As we’ve seen, if we are to pursue “excellence in all things and all things to God’s glory,” we must define standards of excellence for each role and design a lifestyle that will best position us to pursue excellence in each role we’re called to. Next week, we’ll close out this devotional series with an encouraging reminder that even Jesus himself embraced seasons of significant imbalance.